I started in commercial construction 14 years ago. Hammer first, then site-managing trade crews, then running the commercial side from the director's chair. I run Specdoor Ltd — a carpentry and joinery subcontracting business in Melbourne, doing fitout, multi-residential, and education projects. Six active jobs, eight site staff, four million in active work at any one time. That is the business that built TradeControl.
The first five-figure loss I ever absorbed as a director was a back charge on a fitout job in 2022. It was $11,400. The damage was clearly caused by a trade three weeks after our install. I had photos somewhere on site managers' phones. I had daily reports in a paper folder somewhere. I had a Scope of Works in an email attachment somewhere. By the time I pulled it all together, the head contractor had already deducted the charge and moved on.
That afternoon was the moment TradeControl exists for. The records were always there. The discipline of putting them together fast — inside a contractual time-bar — wasn't. So we built the discipline into software. Index every SOW. Photo-first capture. Voice input. AI that drafts defences with clause references in under 30 seconds. Directors review and ship. No fabrication, no clause-inventing, every output reviewed by a human before it leaves the company.
The product is mine first. I use every feature on every job. If a feature does not earn its place when I am on a site visit at 7:30am, it does not ship to other subbies. The development cadence is direct because the customer base is me first, then directors of similarly-sized commercial subcontracting firms in Australia.
What TradeControl is not: it is not legal advice, it is not a head-contractor program management tool, and it is not an accounting or invoicing replacement. It is a commercial documentation and AI-drafting platform specifically for subcontractor directors who want to stop losing money to undocumented variations, speculative back charges, and missed time-bar notices.